To determine the rate of rape crimes declared unfounded, or groundless, by law enforcement agencies, we analyzed Uniform Crime Reporting data collected by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Mason now admits on record that Peggy's doubt was the main reason he fully shifted to disbelieving Marie. The third doubter was an anonymous caller. Marie, crying, said she believed the rape really happened. And for him to know that we figured you out. Galbraith is now a Colorado Bureau of Investigation agent. He asked if there was really a rapist running around the neighborhood that the police should be looking for. After the attack, she says she was forced to stand up in front of a group of teens at a Cocoon House-run program and confess that she'd lied about the rape, something which resulted in her having to see a councilor. Rittgard left the police force before OLearys arrest, but the case review found that threatening her with imprisonment and the possible loss of her housing was coercive, cruel, and unbelievably unprofessional. In the book-length follow-up to their original reporting, journalists T. Christian Miller and Ken Armstrong said Rittgarn had objected to his work being labeled as bullying and wanted money to talk to them. The lawsuit alleges that the woman was required to stand up in front of other program participants and say that she had lied about being raped or risk being evicted, according to the lawsuit. He told This American Life that learning he'd been mistaken "was so shocking that this has been the one thing where I seriously step back and question if I should continue doing what I'm doing." On Aug. 18, D.M. Hendershot is now a sergeant in the Westminster Police Department. What do you think should happen to someone who would lie about something like this? No matter what, you can always turn to The Marshall Project as a source of trustworthy journalism about the criminal justice system. We also ran the same calculation for Washington state law enforcement agencies that cover cities of the same size as Lynnwood to account for possible variations due to the size of a jurisdiction or local laws. It was also detailed in the "Anatomy of Doubt" episode of the podcast This American Life. LYNNWOOD, Wash. The city of Lynnwood will pay $150,000 in a settlement with a rape victim, after Lynnwood police claimed she lied about the attack in 2008. Like her fictional counterpart, played with heartbreaking vulnerability by Kaitlyn Dever, Adler was a product of the foster-care system and had been abused. Jerry Rittgarn declined to be interviewed. While neither Wever nor Collette ever met the detectives, Collette tells OprahMag.com that she learned Hendershot requested her character be portrayed as "badass and bitchin'." 2023 Vox Media, LLC. She was fined $500 in 2009 after entering into a diversionary agreement. Busy Phillips Is Not Like a Regular Mom, Shes a Cool Mom, Theres nothing wrong with Busy Phillips being cast as Mrs. George in the upcoming, In Search of Tom and Katies Bubba Painting, Maybe punting on the larger plot can be forgiven if we get a sweet. However, based on those statements, T. Christian Miller is a senior editor for ProPublica. , updated and her family We strongly believe that Cocoon House and its employees acted appropriately on behalf of the client.'. Even with the strong language used in the Lynnwood Police Department investigation cited in the ProPublica article, no one at the department lost their job. In it she claims the detectives ignored her account of events and bullied her into saying the rape never happened. The women of, Sam Levinson and the Weeknd Allegedly Turned, Theres No Red Button You Can Push to Stop. We excluded agencies that did not report crime statistics in any given month, as well as those that reported no crimes of any kind in a year. When Mason, accompanied by Detective (Jerry) Rittgarn, went to pick up Marie at about 3:30 p.m., they found her outside her apartment, sitting on the grass. But shes actually telling the truth; she really was raped. We received thousands of pages of documents through public-records requests filed with the following agencies: the police departments in Lynnwood and Kirkland, Washington; the police departments in Golden, Westminster, Aurora and Lakewood, Colorado; and the prosecuting attorneys offices in Snohomish County, Washington, King County, Washington, and Jefferson County, Colorado. Rittgarn asked Marie. It was one of many friendships she lost after the Lynnwood charged her as a false accuser. This includes publishing or syndicating our work on platforms or apps such as Apple News, Google News, etc. Edna Hendershot and Sgt. Professionalism, vigilance, community, my ass. It follows the initial investigation into a the assault of a young woman named Marie. Edna Hendershot and Sgt. When the detectives returned, they saw that Maries new statement described the rape as a dream, not a lie. Lynnwood, Washington, United States 3 connections. It went to the FBI lab [in Quantico], Galbraith told 48 Hours in 2017. She's soon accused of making it all up, and is subsequently punished for the "lie" again and again. D.M., who now lives in Wyoming, declined to comment for this story, said her attorney, H. Richmond Fisher. As in the series, Cunningham and Maries transitional housing case manager were with Marie when police arrived after the rape, and she later shared her doubts about it with them. Everything You Never Thought to Ask About In-flight Entertainment, Warner Bros. Discoverys licensing chief on how movies and TV get on planes, editing decisions, and the curious case of. She is charged with false reporting, ostracized from friends and family, and made a pariah by local media. Cocoon House CEO Cassie Franklin told the Seattle Times this week: 'Our hearts go out to D.M. According to the suit, Rittgarn and Mason had D.M. While no good came out of this for Marie at the time, her case has since helped shape how rapes are now processed, with Rider explaining, We learned a great deal from this. Jun 1985 - Jun 19894 years 1 month. Any website our stories appear on must include a prominent and effective way to contact you. Read the story here. American History Has Been Whitewashed, But, Black Teen Girls On TV Are A Mess Finally, the detectives dont believe the story Marie, The Marshall Projects An Unbelievable Story of Rape. Things you buy through our links may earnNew Yorka commission. He actually met with Marie again after the truth came out and later told The Marshall Project, It wasnt her job to try to convince me. with loss of housing benefits and made her tell other program participants that she lied. And while we dont know if she was really a Druid like Annaleigh Ashfords Lilly Darrow, a 46-year-old artist did distract OLeary long enough to escape by jumping out of her bedroom window, breaking several ribs and puncturing a lung in the process. A Full Recap of the Infuriating True Story Behind Netflix's New Miniseries, Unbelievable. While Hendershot never suspected or chatted up an off-duty police officer in a bar to get his DNA, as Grace does in episode six, she did stay behind so Galbraith could arrest OLeary solo, as seen in episode seven. had made up the story.". D.M. Mason told ProPublica, "It wasnt her job to try to convince me. Creative Commons License (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Of course, they weren't the only factors: The case wasnt helped by the fact that Maries foster mothers called to tell the police they also believed Marie was lying about the rape. The police called her a liar. The article also notes that Lynnwood reported 21.3 percent of rape cases "unfounded," or rather, lied about. Galbraith came across a victim she didn't recognize while looking through the images. Our editors handpick the products that we feature. In Marie's case, neither of her foster moms thought she was behaving like it really happened, for different reasons: Shannon decided Marie didn't seem sad enough just hours after the crime, telling ProPublica, "There was just no emotion. Neither officer faced any disciplinary action for the botched investigation. D.M.s lawsuit also names as defendants the agency that runs the program, According to A False Report, she became a long-haul trucker. To calculate the rate, we summed the number of unfounded rapes and divided it by the number of reported rapes. UnitedHealthcare Tried to Deny Coverage to a Chronically Ill Patient. Jerry Rittgarn declined to be interviewed. A police narrative from Detective Jerry Rittgarn states, "I talked with Sgt. In 2011, OLeary was caught and found with a photograph of D.M.s ID card. I give our client a tremendous amount of credit, said H. Richmond Fisher, one of her attorneys. They ignored all the objective evidence collected by the Lynnwood Police Department and Providence Hospital on the day of the rape, the lawsuit alleges. HMH 361 ComNav CH-53 Helicopters. And even if you decide there's not enough evidence to convict, you don't go after an alleged rape victim, Ward said. Along with Esquire, his work has appeared in NYLON, Vulture, and USA Today. In this report a sex crimes supervisor noted that Marie's situation was nothing short of the victim being coerced into admitting that she lied about the rape. The investigation concluded that bullying and hounding led to Marie's admittance of false reporting. In August 2008, a stranger broke into the apartment of an 18-year-old Lynnwood woman, gagged her, bound her hands with a shoelace and raped her. Grusing was the only officer to interview the serial rapist, perhaps because, as Taggart says to Karen and Grace about Chris in episode eight, women make him uncomfortable., Eric Langes detached Detective Parker is a surrogate for Sergeant Jeffrey Mason, who spent the bulk of his career on patrol and in narcotics and had little rape-investigation experience when he became the lead on Adlers case. . And I was told that probably no one ever will.. After the media caught wind of Marie's false report misdemeanor, that same best friend created a website devoted to eviscerating her reputation, sharing Marie's photo and full name as well as police reports that alleged she was a liar. The rapist, Marc OLeary, is currently serving a 327 1/2-year sentence in Colorado for raping multiple women, including the Lynnwood woman and a Kirkland woman. Meanwhile, Peggy thought Marie seemed too upset when she called her"It sounded like a lot of drama, too, in some ways," she said. She got married and has two kids, and they live "somewhere in the middle of the country" as of 2018. It wasnt until 2 years later, when former Washington state resident Marc OLeary was arrested for several rapes in Colorado, that Lynnwood police reopened their investigation. D.M., the detective wrote in a police report, would not look him in the eye, repeatedly said she believed she had been raped and, when initially asked if people should be worried that a rapist was on the loose, she reportedly said no. She eventually left Washington, now working as a long-haul truck driver and married with two children. O'Leary was convicted of five rapes, including the Lynnwood one, and is serving a 327-year sentence in a Colorado prison. We received thousands of pages of documents through public-records requests filed with the following agencies: the police departments in Lynnwood and Kirkland, Washington; the police departments in Golden, Westminster, Aurora and Lakewood, Colorado; and the prosecuting attorneys offices in Snohomish County, Washington, King County, Washington, and Jefferson County, Colorado. Justin Kirkland is a Brooklyn-based writer who covers culture, food, and the South. She walked away with $150,000, according to the Seattle Times. In real life, Jerry had already left the Lynnwood Police Department before Marie's attacker was convicted, and as far as we can tell, he has declined requests to be interviewed in the time. Rittgarn told her that if she was lying she would go to jail and that he would not recommend Cocoon House keep her, the suit alleges. Terms of Service apply. FBI figures show that police annually declare around 5 percent of rape cases unfounded, or baseless. From there, the show continues to follow a true story reported by ProPublica. Jeffrey Mason and Jerry Rittgarn, pressed on the inconsistencies in her story. The three went to the Lynnwood police station, where the detectives escorted Marie to a conference room. He told police that hed fantasized about rape since he was a kid and that his assaults were a type of rape theater inspired by the Star Wars scene in which Jabba the Hutt chains up Princess Leia. Doctors also collected DNA specimens, according to the lawsuit. They told her the Lynnwood case was closed. She recently watched the series, according to ProPublica reporter Ken Armstrong; with Adlers permission, he tweeted some of her thoughts about the show. Why didnt you write that you made the story up? "There was a particular photo that I really liked that she took. Last week, D.M. (Warning: Unbelievable spoilers below). Pruitt and Eric Lange played Det. When the woman reported the attack to Lynnwood police, she says detectives Jerry Rittgarn and Sgt. . As Marie told Sergeant Jerry Mason and Detective Jerry Rittgarn, she'd fallen asleep after a late-night phone chat with her friend Jordan, an ex. Notably, Marie's rape claim was one of four that Lynnwood police deemed unfounded that year alone. After collecting sufficient evidence, detectives eventually arrested Marc O'Leary, a former Marine. And I am not the only person that didnt believe her., Bridget Everetts amiable Colleen is a stand-in for Adlers real-life foster mother Shannon McQuery. To calculate the rate, we summed the number of unfounded rapes and divided it by the number of reported rapes. The (male) detectives Marie goes to see after shes raped believe shes lying and get a coerced confession out of her recanting what shes already reported. Nobody can get into it. She agreed, so they left her alone for a few minutes. Enter detectives Stacy Galbraith from Denver and Edna Hendershot from Westminster. According to the ProPublica article, after Marie's rapist was apprehended, the Lynnwood. An Unbelievable Story of Rape Rasmussen and Duvall catch the serial rapist, and Marie's original report is proved to have been true. Social scientists examining police records in detail and using methodologically rigorous standards cite similar, single-digit rates. From research and studies summarized in a Department of Justice-funded study, Policing and Prosecuting Sexual Assault in Los Angeles City and County, 2012 by Cassia Spohn and Katharine Tellis and from an analysis by ProPublica and The Marshall Project of FBI Uniform Crime Reporting program data, 2008-2012. Knowing all of this including the fact that Marie was telling the truth youd tend to think both of these detectives would be suffer some consequence for the whole ordeal. She and her husband took in the high-schooler for a short time when her previous foster familys plans to adopt her fell through. Rapes by strangers were uncommon maybe about 13 percent of cases. From the National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey, 2011, Only about one-fifth to one-third of rapes get reported to police, national surveys show. From National Crime and Victimization Survey, 2014 and National Violence Against Women Survey, 2006. The show mirrors the structure of the original article, which interweaves the two stories the same way. There are 7 professionals named "Jerry Ritt", who use LinkedIn to exchange information, ideas, and opportunities. The lawsuit alleges police ignored or disregarded this evidence once they convinced themselves she was not telling the truth. We reviewed Maries civil suit against Lynnwood, which included such legal exhibits as the medical report from the day she reported being raped and case notes from Project Ladder, the transitional housing program to which she belonged. They exchanged tidbits about their liveslike how they both had two kids. Did Cirie go too far by bringing family matters into the game? And what might be the most unbelievable part of unbelievable is that the detectives who believed Marie was lying weren't reprimanded whatsoever, even though they deeply damaged this young woman emotionally. After claiming police coerced her into recanting her story,. Words or thoughts attributed to anyone in this story are drawn from these interviews or documents. Jensen, the Lynnwood police chief, said he could not comment because of the litigation. Cocoon House, and two of its employees. When Marie's rapist was caught, Detective Rittgarn had already left the Lynnwood police department. But even before it received the Netflix treatment, the narrative emerged from "An Unbelievable Story of Rape," a seminal piece of reporting from The Marshall Project and ProPublica that earned writers Ken Armstrong and T. Christian Miller the Pulitzer Prize. After the Lynnwood, Washington, police coerced her recantation and charged her with a gross misdemeanor, Adler took a plea deal and paid a $500 fine. At first he could not recall the case, except that he. Then 18, she reported the attack but she says detectives Jerry Rittgarn and Sergeant Jeff Mason didn't believe her story, and ignored evidence including stained sheets, doctors reports detailing injuries to her wrists and abrasions on her genitals and DNA samples.
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